Asian Review of Books

• Justin Marozzi, "Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World" (Pegasus Books, 2025)

  Slavery has been a ubiquitous practice throughout much of world history–and the Muslim world was no exception. Slave soldiers, concubines, and eunuchs can be found throughout Muslim writings—which, as Justin Marozzi points out in his book Captives and Companions: A History of Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Islamic World (Pegasus Books, 2025), ends up giving us a selective and narrow view of who slaves were, and what they did. Justin tries to dive into this history–sometimes very patchy history–to figure out the full extent of slavery in the Muslim world, from the very start of Muslim society, through the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary Pirates, to abolition and the final decision by Mauritania to abolish slavery in 1981. Justin Marozzi is a former Financial Times and Economist foreign correspondent. He is also the author of several books, including Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood (Allen Lane: 2014) and Islamic Empires: The Cities that Shaped the Modern World (Pegasus Books: 2020). You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Captives and Companions. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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• Harini Nagendra, "Into the Leopard's Den: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery" (Pegasus Crime, 2025)

  Into the Leopard’s Den (Pegasus / Hachette India: 2025), the latest novel in the Bangalore Detective Club series by Harini Nagendra, opens with a home invasion gone wrong: An elderly woman in 1920s India, murdered by a mystery assailant during a robbery. Kaveri Murthy, amateur detective, takes on the case–and soon uncovers a whole array of other mysteries in the coffee plantations of Coorg: a ghost leopard stalking the woods, and a series of murder attempts against a widely-disliked colonial plantation owner. London-based business and culture journalist Prarthana Prakash joins me on the show today as a guest host. Harini is a professor of ecology at Azim Premji University, and a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of nature and sustainability. She is internationally recognized for her scholarship on sustainability, with honors that include the 2009 Cozzarelli Prize from the US National Academy of Sciences, the 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar award, and the 2017 Clarivate Web of Science award for interdisciplinary research in India. Her non-fiction books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future (Oxford University Press: 2016), Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities (Penguin Random House India: 2023), So Many Leaves, and Cities and Canopies: Trees in Indian Cities (India Viking: 2019) You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Into the Leopard’s Den. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at@nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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• Stephen C. Mercado, "Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito's Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War" (Pen & Sword Military, 2025)

  War, and the threat of war, spurs governments to invest in secret military technologies and weapons. Imperial Japan, ahead of the Second World War, was no exception. After the First World War, Japan set up the Noborito Research Institute: a division of scientists and technicians to invest in overt and clandestine warfare. Stephen Mercado dives into this history in his new book Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons: How Noborito’s Scientists and Technicians Served in the Second World War and the Cold War (Pen & Sword Books: 2025). At Noborito, Japanese scientists researched fanciful weapons, like balloon bombs and death rays; covert techniques like poisons and counterfeiting—and more insidious activities, like biological weapons. Stephen Mercado, the author of The Shadow Warriors of Nakano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Elite Intelligence School, has also written a dozen articles and several dozen book reviews on Asian and open-source intelligence. His writing has appeared in the journals Intelligence and National Security, International Journal of Intelligence and Counter Intelligence, Studies in Intelligence and on the website 38 North of the Henry L. Stimson Center. His translations include numerous declassified Chinese and Japanese diplomatic documents published as part of the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project. Retired from the CIA Open Source Enterprise, he has twice won a CIA Studies in Intelligence award for his writings. He is also a frequent contributor to the Asian Review of Books. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Japanese Spy Gear and Special Weapons. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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• Abhimanyu Kumar and Aletta André, "The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy" (HarperCollins India, 2025)

  Begum Wilayat Mahal, the self-proclaimed heir to the House of Awadh, has fascinated journalists and writers for decades. She claimed she was Indian royalty, descended from the kings of Awadh, a kingdom annexed by the British in 1856. She spent a decade in the waiting room of the New Delhi train station, receiving journalists intrigued by the image of Indian royals in cramped conditions. Then, her family was granted use of a rundown 14th-century hunting lodge in Delhi; none were seen in public again. Both during Wilayat Mahal’s life, and after her death, journalists have tried to figure out whether her story was true, most famously by a 2019 feature by the New York Times that picked apart the family’s story. Now, in their book The House of Awadh: A Hidden Tragedy (HarperCollins India: 2025), Aletta André and Abhimanyu Kumar dig into Begum Wilayat Mahal’s past, chasing down leads in India and Pakistan to fully explore this story. Aletta André is a Dutch historian and journalist, who has covered South Asia for Dutch and international media since 2009. Abhimanyu Kumar is an Indian poet and journalist with a wide experience covering politics, arts, culture and minority issues. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of The House of Awadh. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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• Moudhy Al-Rashid, "Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History" (W.W. Norton, 2025)

  In 1923, archaeologist Leonard Woolley stumbled upon a room that dated back to 530BC, the time of the Babylonians. Oddly, the room was filled with artifacts that were thousands of years older. A clay drum led Woolley to speculate that he might have stumbled across the world’s first museum. Whether that was really the case is still somewhat unknown. But this room is the inspiration behind Moudhy Al-Rashid’s book Between Two Rivers: Ancient Mesopotamia and the Birth of History (W.W. Norton / Hodder, 2025) which dives into the many different aspects of life and society across the many states that governed Mesopotamia. Moudhy Al-Rashid is an honorary fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College, where she specializes in the languages and history of ancient Mesopotamia. You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Between Two Rivers. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia. Nicholas Gordon is an editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/asian-review

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